Examining 'The Leftovers,' After The Rapture

Tom Perrotta is the author of several novels, including Election and Little Children.

Mark Ostow
/ Courtesy Tom Perrotta

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Originally published on May 25, 2012 2:11 pm

This interview was originally broadcast on August 25, 2011. The Leftovers is now available in paperback.

Last year, California-based preacher Harold Camping announced that the beginning of the end of the world would take place on May 21, 2011. The date passed by with no apparent rapture, and Camping became the butt of many late-night talk show jokes.

But what if the rapture did actually occur? That's the premise of Tom Perrotta's latest novel, The Leftovers, which examines the aftermath of an unexplained rapturelike event in which millions of people around the globe inexplicably disappear into thin air.

Perrotta tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that he got the idea for the novel while traveling around the country, doing speaking engagements for The Abstinence Teacher, his novel about small-town culture wars.

"I spent a lot of time thinking about contemporary Christianity, and obviously the rapture kept coming up," he says. "My first impulse was ... to laugh it off — it's sort of a funny idea, people just floating away. But I kept thinking: What if it did happen? ... I thought, I'm such a skeptic that even if it did happen, I would resist the implications of it, and I also thought that three years later, everyone would have forgotten about it. No matter what horrible thing happens in the world, the culture seems to move on."

Perrotta's novel takes place after the rapture, in a small New Jersey suburb, where families are trying to get on with their lives. The Garvey family, for instance, didn't lose any family members in the rapture but has fallen apart in the aftermath. The father, Kevin, watches as his teenagers change and his wife, Laurie, leaves his house to join a cult called "The Guilty Remnant," whose members dress all in white and take a vow of silence.

"The thing that makes [members of the 'Guilty Remnant'] so distinctive is that they're smoking constantly," says Perrotta. "It's a declaration of faith and a sense that they have that there's no future and they don't have to worry about their health. ... They see themselves as living reminders. They see themselves as bearing witness, and there is this guilty sense — they believe that they were rejected by God."

Perrotta says he wanted to play with the idea that being alive — or left behind — was somehow more of a punishment instead of a gift.

"No one in the Garvey family has disappeared, and yet a number of them are all haunted by losses," he says. "Laurie's best friend's daughter is gone. And somehow that disappearance has shocked her out of her own life, and she spends a lot of time helping her friend grieve. And that grief, she says, feels sort of right — and it's the place where she needs to live. She can't find her way back to any kind of normal life."

Perrotta is also the author of Little Children, a take on parenthood and suburbia, and the novels Joe College and Election.Election was made into the 1999 movie of the same name.

Interview Highlights

On satire

"I don't feel like I'm a satirist. I don't even think I ever was, but that label has stuck to me because the movie Election was a brilliant satire, and it amped up some elements that were muted in the book to do that. And that's the first way people became familiar with my work. Labels tend to stick and first impressions tend to stick, but I will say that what happens for me is that I do start in a place that feels like it might lead to a satire, and then the process of spending time with characters — getting inside their heads, trying to see the world the way they see it — pulls me away from satire. And I think a lot of times you can't see where you're going to end up."

On fiction vs. religion

"I would probably have to say that reading fiction — those stories fill the space that other people might use religious stories for. The bulk of what I know about human life I've gotten from novels. And I think the thing about novels that make them important to the people who love them is that there's always another perspective. I think there's no novel that really works unless it has an internal dialogue and attention. And I think that is obviously a real alternative to religion which tends to give you a unified perspective and isn't that interested in competing ideas that are equally valid. ... It's very relative in that sense — absolute — and that's what drives religious conservatives crazy. They don't like the idea that there are multiple truths for multiple people."

On absence in his own life

"I was in my 40s before I lost anyone in my immediate family. So it feels like my life is unfolding according to the natural schedule of things. There has been nobody dying well before their time. My father died nine years ago now, and it's funny — life is a series of entirely predictable shocks. My father died. I think he was in his 70s. He was in a car accident, so it was a sudden event. It was a sunny day. I was out for a bike ride and I came home and got a phone call and learned that my father had just died.

"Obviously that sense of someone just being there and being gone is connected with that. Yes, there's grief in that very real sense and there's that other sense of living long enough that some parts of your life are behind you. There are many people who are close to me that I no longer see. As you get older, you start to feel the absences around you take on the kind of importance that they didn't have earlier."

On romanticizing the dead

"The way to respect life and to hold onto an individual is to remember them in their complexity."

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Transcript

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, sitting in for Terry Gross. Our guest, Tom Perrotta, wrote the novels "Election" and "Little Children," which were both adapted into films. His latest novel, "The Leftovers," starts with this premise: What if suddenly millions of people instantaneously vanished in a scenario similar to but definitely different from the Rapture?

The novel is about those people left on Earth or, as the title puts it, the leftovers. Perrotta explores how they cope with grief and loss and why some see this as an act of God and believe it's the start of the end times while others struggle to find ways to live with the inexplicable.

Tom Perrotta is in the process of adapting "The Leftovers" for HBO. His previous novel, "The Abstinence Teacher," was about the culture wars, focusing on a sex education teacher who's pressured to teach abstinence only. Terry spoke with Tom Perrotta last August, when "The Leftovers" was published just a couple of weeks before the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. The novel is now out in paperback.

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

Tom Perrotta, welcome back to FRESH AIR. Your book isn't about the Rapture per se, but to understand what's in the book, you have to understand what beliefs about the Rapture are. So why don't we start with that. What is your understanding of the Rapture?

TOM PERROTTA: Well, the Rapture is part of pre-millennial end-times theology. It's actually a pretty recent part of Christianity. I think it was a 19th-century invention or formulation, and it's the beginning of the second coming, which is a seven-year period.

So basically, the Rapture is the first real occasion the Christians on Earth rise to meet Jesus in the sky, and the people who are left behind suffer through a seven-year period of tribulation, which is wars, plagues, all kinds of suffering, and there's a big battle that involves the Antichrist and Armageddon and finally the second coming and the millennium, which is, you know, Christ's kingdom on Earth for 1,000 years.

GROSS: So in the Rapture, the believers rise to heaven, and the nonbelievers stay behind and have to deal with the tribulations, the plagues and floods and all that.

PERROTTA: Exactly.

GROSS: Okay. So I want you to read an excerpt of the prologue to your novel "The Leftovers," and this is from the point of view of Laurie, who's an agnostic who lives with her husband. They have two children, a boy in college and a girl in high school.

She never believed in the Rapture. She says that it always seemed like religious kitsch to her, kind of like one of those black velvet paintings. And then she's kind of hit with the fact that all these people have disappeared. So why don't you pick it up from there?

PERROTTA: Okay. (Reading) Then it happened. The biblical prophecy came true or at least partly true. People disappeared, millions of them at the same time, all over the world. This wasn't some ancient rumor - a dead man coming back to life during the Roman Empire - or a dusty homegrown legend, Joseph Smith unearthing golden tablets in upstate New York, conversing with an angel. This was real.

(Reading) The Rapture happened in her hometown, to her best friend's daughter among others, while Laurie herself was in the house. God's intrusion into her life couldn't have been any clearer if he'd addressed her from a burning azalea. At least you would have thought so.

(Reading) And yet she managed to deny the obvious for weeks and months afterward, clinging to her doubts like a life preserver, desperately echoing the scientists and pundits and politicians who insisted that the cause of what they called the Sudden Departure remained unknown, and cautioned the public to avoid jumping to conclusions until the release of the official report by the nonpartisan government panel that was investigating the matter.

(Reading) Something tragic occurred, the experts repeated over and over. It was a Rapture-like phenomenon, but it doesn't appear to have been the Rapture.

(Reading) Interestingly, some of the loudest voices making this argument belonged to Christians themselves, who couldn't help noticing that many of the people who'd disappeared on October 14th - Hindus and Buddhists and Muslims and Jews and atheists and animists and homosexuals and Eskimos and Mormons and Zoroastrians, whatever the heck they were - hadn't accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior.

(Reading) As far as anyone could tell, it was a random harvest, and the one thing the Rapture couldn't be was random. The whole point was to separate the wheat from the chaff, to reward the true believers and put the rest of the world on notice. An indiscriminate Rapture was no Rapture at all.

(Reading) So it was easy enough to be confused, to throw up your hands and claim that you just didn't know what was going on. But Laurie knew. Deep in her heart, as soon as it happened, she knew. She'd been left behind. They all had.

(Reading) It didn't matter that God hadn't factored religion into His decision-making. If anything, that just made it worse, more of a personal rejection. And yet she chose to ignore this knowledge, to banish it to some murky recess of her mind - the basement storage area for things you couldn't bear to think about - the same place you hid the knowledge that you were going to die so you could live your life without being depressed every minute of every day.

GROSS: And that's Tom Perrotta, reading from his new novel "The Leftovers." So at the center of this is the idea if something inexplicable happened, would you attribute it to God, or would you find a scientific, secular reason to explain it. Who believes this is an act of God? Who believes it's some kind of scientific or just inexplicable phenomenon that is not related to religion? Why did you want to pose that question in your novel?

PERROTTA: Well, that's a very good question. I think when you write a book, you start, I think, in a much vaguer place. You're not really sure what question you're posing. So in this case, I wrote a book called "The Abstinence Teacher," it was my last novel, and it was about the culture wars in the U.S. and centered around sex education.

And I spent a lot of time thinking about contemporary Christianity and reading about it, and obviously the Rapture kept coming up. And, you know, my first impulse was like Laurie's, to sort of laugh it off. It's sort of a funny idea, you know, people just floating away.

But I also kept thinking: Well, what if it did happen? You know, I'm such a skeptic that I think even if it did happen, I thought I would resist the implications of it, and I also thought three years later, everyone would have forgotten about it - that no matter what horrible thing happens in the world, you know, the culture seems to move on and keep flowing into the present moment.

And so the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a really rich metaphor for thinking about the way that we react to, as you say, incomprehensible events, horrible events, things that we can't completely understand. There are these dueling impulses to, you know, to remember and bear witness and to forget and move on. And this was the scenario that I chose to explore those impulses.

GROSS: Now, your book is being published very close to the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and in a way that seems like no coincidence because I kept thinking about 9/11 when reading your book because many people in New York, you know, did disappear. They disappeared into, into the rubble of the towers. Their remnants, their remains were never found.

PERROTTA: And, you know, I certainly was thinking about it as I wrote it. I didn't write the book as a kind of direct response to 9/11, but I did keep getting hung up on this idea of seven years, and that's the period of the tribulation mentioned in end-times theology. And I kept thinking, you know, seven years is such a long time.

You know, I remember 10 years ago feeling like, you know, the world will never be the same, we'll never forget this. And I think, you know, even four and five years later, it started to seem like something that had already been absorbed by history, that we had moved past it.

Now obviously for people who were directly affected, it's never absorbed by history, it's always present. And so it was one of the really contemporary examples I had of this process, but you can name any number of traumatic 20th-century events and think about, you know, how quickly people managed to - many people managed to move on.

GROSS: The mother in the book, whose point of view we heard represented in the reading that you did, she joins this cult-like group called The Guilty Remnant. Would you describe the group?

PERROTTA: The Guilty Remnant represents a very extreme reaction to this event, the Rapture, the Sudden Departure. These people are kind of a home-grown suburban cult, and they have taken over a development on one side of town, that - eight homes, eight really big homes, and they're living there as a commune.

They dress in white, and that makes them distinctive. They travel in same-sex pairs throughout the town. The thing that makes them most distinctive is that they are smoking constantly. This is a sort of a declaration of faith and also a sense that they have that there's no future, that they don't have to worry about their health or anything like that.

And what they do is just follow people around, and they see themselves as living reminders. They devote themselves to bearing witness, and there is this guilty sense: They believe that they were in some way rejected by God.

They're not - they don't necessarily identify as Christians, but they have absorbed that viewpoint on the Rapture, that they were, in a sense, left behind, judged and found wanting, and they don't - they dedicate themselves to preventing a return to normalcy in the town.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Tom Perrotta. His new novel is called "The Leftovers," and he also wrote the books "Election" and "Little Children," which were adapted into popular films. Let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Tom Perrotta. He's the author of the novels "Election" and "Little Children," which were adapted into films. His new novel "The Leftovers" is set in a suburb during a Rapture-like experience when a lot of people suddenly disappear from Earth. Some people think this is the Rapture, that they've been raptured to heaven as a precurser of the end times. Other people think it's a mysterious phenomenon that needs further investigation.

But everybody is suffering from grief because nearly every family has lost someone. Do you know why the people in your own novel disappeared?

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

PERROTTA: No, no, I didn't. Partly I'm always impatient in science fiction movies or books where there's this explanation, well, there was a temporary disturbance in the Earth's magnetic field or...

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

GROSS: Yeah.

PERROTTA: Or, you know, tons of industrial waste were dumped into the river, and that's why this monster was created. Yeah, I understand that there may be social criticism embedded in those sort of explanations, but they always seem kind of cheap and easy. And in any case, for me the book was really about the experience of not knowing.

As I say, I'm a skeptic myself or an agnostic, whatever word you want to put on it, and I do feel like, you know, the burden of living with that sort of skepticism is that you are confronted with not having a story about, you know, why terrible things happen or, you know, what the meaning is of our time on Earth.

And so to me, you know - and the apocalyptic religious stories are always about, you know, imposing a final meaning on the mysteries of life, and, you know, this is an agnostic's apocalypse where even this event that should make everything clear just makes it all murky.

GROSS: Did you grow up with religion?

PERROTTA: Yeah, though - yes, I grew up Catholic in the 1970s, and it was not a very rigorous religious upbringing. I stayed in the church right up to the point where I got confirmed at age 13, and that was basically considered - that was basically what we did. It was like just stay in, get confirmed. It was almost like I graduated from church.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

GROSS: Right. Right, so you didn't even need to have a falling out. You just graduated.

PERROTTA: Yeah, you didn't have to go anymore.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

GROSS: But knowing what you know about Roman Catholicism and then having done some studying of evangelical Christianity for this book and also for your previous book "The Abstinence Teacher," what are some of the differences that you see between the two approaches to faith?

PERROTTA: Well, that's sort of an enormous question. I mean, the thing that most struck me in, you know, studying evangelical culture for "The Abstinence Teacher" was just how crucial the Bible was and one's own reading of the Bible and one's understanding of the Bible and one's personal choices. And I don't remember feeling like, you know, the Catholic Church was encouraging, you know, one to independently read the Bible.

I'm sure that people are going to - people who are Catholics now will tell me that I'm wrong about some of these things, but this was my own experience at the time. It felt somewhat - it was more - I guess I should say I was raised in the kind of Catholic culture rather than as a, you know, religious person. So - but it was not, I was not encouraged to read the Bible or make, you know, very personal religious choices.

GROSS: Since you're not someone who turns to the Bible for explanations about life and death and other mysteries, do you find that fiction is helpful in if not comprehending the world at least finding people who help explain living in the face of mystery?

PERROTTA: Oh, yeah. I mean, I would probably have to say that reading fiction, you know, that's what - those stories fill the space that, you know, other people might use religious stories for. You know, the bulk of what I know about human life, I've gotten from novels.

And I think, you know, the thing about novels that make them important to the people who love them is that there's always another perspective. There's no novel that I think really works unless it has a kind of internal dialogue and a tension.

And I think that is obviously, you know, a real alternative to religion, which tends to give you a unified perspective and isn't that interested in the idea that there are competing ideas that are equally valid or valid if you are a person in, you know, one set of circumstances and less valid if you're a person in another set of circumstances.

It's very relative in that sense, as opposed to absolute, and that's what drives, you know, religious conservatives crazy. They don't like this idea that there are multiple truths for multiple people.

GROSS: So in talking about how literature has filled a very important function in your life, no one, I think, has turned to your novels in a way that somebody would turn to the Bible, however...

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

GROSS: Your stories have become very popular, and I'm thinking about, like, your book "Election." When Hillary Clinton was running for president, she was sometimes compared to a character in your novel "Election" who's kind of ruthless when she's campaigning for, like, the high school student council president.

What did it feel like to have this fictional creation of yours be used in that kind of way, like people were using it to help explain who they thought Hillary Clinton was?

PERROTTA: Yeah, that was very interesting. I think when it first happened, I was really flattered and kind of excited because I think there's always this secret dream you might have as a writer that, you know, you're going to influence the culture and that, you know, people will use characters you've created as a kind of shorthand.

And I think, you know - so I actually was in the car and the radio, and somebody was sort of talking about, you know, Hillary as a Tracy Flick, and by the way, they then did it with Sarah Palin, and they did it with Kirsten Gillibrand, and then I started to get nervous because I thought, Tracy Flick is just one character in this book "Election," and she's been made memorable really by Reese Witherspoon's amazing performance in that movie, but I did feel like she was starting to be kind of an anti-feminist icon, that, you know, the idea that women of ambition were sort of unpleasant and ruthless and goody-goody.

And that part of it made me uncomfortable. I think the two go together. You know, you write something, and it goes out in the world, and then if you're lucky, the world makes its own use of it. I wasn't all that comfortable with the way Tracy has been used in public discourse.

GROSS: You feel that people were using the character to help stereotype women.

PERROTTA: Yeah, and it didn't almost matter who they were. Any ambitious woman suddenly was a Tracy Flick and was therefore sort of, you know, unpleasant and a little scary.

GROSS: Did you feel like going on all the talk shows and saying wait a minute, you're misinterpreting the character. You're using her to stereotype people in ways I never intended.

PERROTTA: If I got a chance, as I am now having a chance, I will say that I think we should be careful about that. But we'll see if my warnings will have any effect.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

GROSS: I don't think so.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

DAVIES: Tom Perrotta, speaking with Terry Gross. His latest novel, "The Leftovers," has just come out in paperback. He'll be back in the second half of the show. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. We're listening to Terry's interview with Tom Perrotta. His new novel "The Leftovers," has just come out in paperback.

"The Leftovers" is about those left on earth after millions of people instantaneously disappear in a scenario resembling the Rapture. Except that it wasn't just Christian believers who disappeared. It was people of every faith, as well as atheists. But those left behind, the leftovers, are all grieving in their own way as they come to grips with the aftermath.

GROSS: Because grieving is so central to your novel, I was wondering, like, what have been some of the biggest absences in your life?

PERROTTA: Well, I've been pretty lucky. I was into my 40s before I lost anyone in my immediate family. You know, and my grandparents died when I was younger. So it feels like my life is sort of unfolding according to the natural schedule of things - meaning, you know, that there have been no - nobody dying sort of well before their time.

But I will say, you know, my father died nine years ago now, and, you know, life, I think, is just a series of entirely predictable shocks. I mean, my father died. I think that - you know, he was in his 70s. He died in a car accident, so it was a sudden event. You know, it was a sunny day. I was out for a bike ride, and I came home and got a phone call and, you know, learned that my father had just died.

And I think, obviously, that sense of someone just being there and being gone is connected with that. But I think - so I think, yes, there's grief in that very real sense of, you know, my father died. And then there's just that other sense, I think, of, you know, living long enough that some parts of your life are behind you.

I mean, there are many people who are really close to me at various times that I no longer see. I think, you know, as you get older, you just start to feel the absences around you take on a kind of importance that they didn't have earlier.

And some of those absences are absences because people are truly gone, and others are just - they belong to some part of your life that no longer exists.

GROSS: Although your book isn't really about the Rapture, it's inspired by belief in the Rapture - not your belief, but other people's belief. Did you do any research for the book or go to churches or other forms of meetings, gatherings where people who do believe talk about it?

PERROTTA: You know, I haven't. I read the first "Left Behind" book, but I didn't spend a lot of time, you know, researching that firsthand. I had done a lot of research into contemporary Christian life for my last book, and this book was, in a way, more idea-driven.

There were a couple books that really mattered a lot to me. One was called "Pursuit of the Millennium" by a historian named Norman Cohn, which was about these sort of medieval - apocalyptic medieval cults. Some of them were flagellants, and others were cults where people decided that they were, in effect, the second coming of Jesus Christ. And it was really about the way in which these sort of apocalyptic cults emerged from times of great social upheaval and actually political unrest, as well. So that was a book that was really in my mind.

There's a biography of Jim Jones called "Raven" by Tim Reiterman, which was also a really important part of my thinking about the way new religions or, you know, really charismatic, dangerous prophets might emerge.

GROSS: There's a character in your book who is a charismatic religious leader who, in the face of this sudden disappearance, creates a cult around him. Would you describe him a little bit?

PERROTTA: Yeah, this guy's name is - at first he's Mr. Gilchrest. He's a father who has lost his eight-year-old son and has discovered that he has a certain kind of gift, which is to comfort people by hugging them.

And the member of the family - the son in this Garvey family is a guy named Tom, and he goes to college. And Tom is really shaken by the news of the loss of a childhood friend of his, someone he hasn't seen for years, but somehow this loss - he takes it far more personally than Jill takes the loss of her best friend Jen.

Anyway, Tom is in college. He's lost. He's sort of falling apart. And a friend takes him to hear Mr. Gilchrest speak. And Mr. Gilchrest at this point, I think, is a really genuine, grieving man who discovers that he has this power to comfort people. But over time, he becomes intoxicated by his power, and, like many dangerous, self-appointed prophets, uses this power to start controlling people and also, you know, gratifying himself sexually with a lot of young women that he meets at these rallies.

And Tom's story is, in a sense, the story of his disillusionment with Mr. Gilchrest, who, in his charismatic phase, becomes known as Holy Wayne. So Tom is a follower of Holy Wayne.

There are basically three cults that spring up in the book. One is the Guilty Remnant that Laurie Garvey belongs to. And then there's the Holy Wayne movement that Tom Garvey gets involved with. And then there's a sort of neo-hippie group called the Barefoot People, who are a kind of hedonistic alternative to these more religious groups that spring up.

GROSS: The world's going to end, so let's have a good time now.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

PERROTTA: Let's have a good time. Exactly.

GROSS: So your new novel "The Leftovers" is being adapted into an HBO series. Are you working on the adaptation?

PERROTTA: Yeah. I'm going to write the pilot.

GROSS: So what are you going to have to do to make this into television?

PERROTTA: That's a very good question. I think one of the things that I'm pondering right now, and I haven't really done the writing yet, the book has an interesting time frame. It basically does not focus on the Rapture-like event that's at the center of it. It begins about - some months after it happens, and the bulk of the action takes place three years after the event.

So, you know, one of the things I'm really pondering is just: Where do I begin my story? And the thing I love about serial TV drama is that you can really let a story breathe. And, you know, when you're adapting a book for a film, a feature film that's two hours, you're just always compressing and cutting. And I think what TV offers you is the ability to maybe open things up, take events that are just mentioned in passing in the novel and develop them.

So I'm really thinking that there's a lot of material that takes place in this three-year period that I kind of skip over that I might be able to, you know, break open and explore and let breathe.

GROSS: You know, when I first opened your new novel "The Leftovers," I was kind of expecting it to be a social satire about the Rapture and people who believed it. And I don't think that's what it is.

I mean, there are satirical elements in it, but I think what you're really doing is looking at why some people believe, why some people don't believe, how we live in the face of mystery, how we grieve for people who we've lost.

Can you talk a little bit about the tone you wanted and the tone you wanted to use to describe those people who do believe in the Rapture?

PERROTTA: Yeah, no, that's a - I'm really glad you said that, because I don't feel like I'm a satirist. I don't even think I ever was. But that label has stuck to me probably because the movie "Election" was a brilliant satire, and it kind of amped up some elements that were muted in the book to do that. And that was the first way people became familiar with my work. And so labels tend to stick, and first impressions tend to stick.

But I will say that I think what happens for me is that I do start in a place that feels like it might lead to a satire, and then the process of spending time with characters, getting inside their heads, trying to see the world the way they see it, pulls me away from satire.

And I think a lot of times, you know, you can't see where you're going to end up. So I think I did - if you asked me the day I started writing this book, I think I would have told you that it was going to be a lot funnier than it turned out to be. The problem was that to choose the Rapture as your subject matter means that you're dealing with characters who are grieving for the missing.

And the story is the story of an epidemic of grief and loss. And, you know, if there's a religious impulse in the book, it's to me, you know, what must have been the original religious impulse, which is, you know, that faith is a response to incomprehensible loss. And so I don't think that any of the characters who embrace the various faiths that are available in the book are ridiculous. I think that feeling of loss and that need for comfort is a completely human response to what's happened.

GROSS: Tom Perrotta, thank you so much for talking with us.

PERROTTA: Oh, thank you, Terry. I really enjoyed it.

DAVIES: Tom Perrotta, speaking with Terry Gross, recorded last August. Perrotta's novel "The Leftovers" has just come out in paperback. You can read an excerpt on our website, freshair.npr.org.

Perrotta's working on an adaptation of "The Leftovers" for HBO. His previous novel, "The Abstinence Teacher," is also in development as a film, with Lisa Cholodenko slated to direct.

Coming up, Edward Ward tells us about a guitar player whose name you might not know, but is likely on a bunch of albums in your rock collection - or even your parents. This is FRESH AIR. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.